Linking messages and form requests

ABSTRACT

Large organizations with sophisticated infrastructures have large form-based systems that manage the interaction between the user community and the infrastructure. In many cases, when a user needs to complete a form to accomplish a task, the user e-mails a description of the task to the appropriate form expert. In many cases this description is incomplete and the expert engages in a clarification dialog to determine the details of the task. Since many tasks and descriptions are routine, this e-mail dialog can be replaced with an intelligent user interface. The interface proactively reads e-mail (or IM) messages and assists the user in completing the associated task without involving the expert. To ground our vision in a specific application, we have built an agent that functions as a webmaster assistant. For example, a user emails the request: "Change John Doe's home phone number to 800-555-1212" to the agent. The webmaster agent then replies with the biographical data form displaying information about John Doe with the new phone number pre-filled in the form. The user then simply approves the change.In this paper we describe a prototype website maintenance agent that (i) allows users to express the updates they want to make in human terms (free text input expression of intent), and (ii) allows users to quickly repair any inference errors the agent makes. In addition, we present the results of a proof of concept study that details how interacting with a webmaster agent that makes inference errors is both more efficient (faster) and more effective (errors made to site) than sending a request to a human webmaster. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the application of our work to any form-based system.

REFERENCES

• 1: William W. Cohen, Data integration using similarity joins and a word-based information representation language, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.18 n.3, p.288-321, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/352595.352598]
• 2: Michael Collins and Yoram Singer, Unsupervised Models for Named Entity Classification, Proceedings of the Joint SIGDAT Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP99), College Park, MD, 1999.
• 3: Oren Etzioni, Alon Halevy, Henry Levy, and Luke McDowell. Semantic Email: Adding Lightweight Data Manipulation Capabilities to the Email Habitat. International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), June 12-13, 2003, San Diego, California.
• 4: Yoav Freund and Robert E. Schapire Experiments with a New Boosting Algorithm, International Conference on Machine Learning, pp 148--156, 1996.
• 5: Alon Halevy, Oren Etzioni, AnHai Doan, Zachary Ives, Jayant Madhavan, Luke McDowell and Igor Tatarinov, Crossing the Structure Chasm. Conference on Innovative Directions in Research (CIDR 2003).
• 6: Nathan Halstead. Personal Communication, 2003.
• 7: Subbarao Kambhampati and Craig A. Knoblock, editors, Proceedings of the 2003 Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb-03), Acapulco, Mexico, August, 2003.
• 8: John D. Lafferty , Andrew McCallum , Fernando C. N. Pereira, Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data, Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, p.282-289, June 28-July 01, 2001
• 9: Andrea Lockerd , Huy Pham , Taly Sharon , Ted Selker, Mr.Web: an automated interactive webmaster, CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/765891.766007]
• 10: Robert E. Schapire , Yoram Singer, Improved Boosting Algorithms Using Confidence-rated Predictions, Machine Learning, v.37 n.3, p.297-336, Dec. 1999 [doi>10.1023/A:1007614523901]
• 11: Aaron Spaulding. Personal Communication, 2003.
• 12: Tessa A. Lau , Daniel S. Weld, Programming by demonstration: an inductive learning formulation, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.145-152, January 05-08, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/291080.291104]
• 13: Jonathan Grudin, Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organization of organizational interfaces, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.85-93, September 26-28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/62266.62273]
• 14: Bozena H. Thompson , Frederick B. Thompson, Introducing ask, a simple knowledgeable system, Proceedings of the first conference on Applied natural language processing, February 01-03, 1983, Santa Monica, California [doi>10.3115/974194.974198]
• 15: Elaine Rich, Natural-Language Interfaces. IEEE Computer Magazine, September, 1984.
• 16: MinorThird. http://minorthird.sourceforge.net
• 17: P. R. Cohen , M. Dalrymple , D. B. Moran , F. C. Pereira , J. W. Sullivan, Synergistic use of direct manipulation and natural language, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Wings for the mind, p.227-233, March 1989
• 18: Frank Meng, A natural language interface for information retrieval from forms on the World Wide Web, Proceeding of the 20th international conference on Information Systems, p.540-545, December 12-15, 1999, Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
• 19: William Cohen, Einat Minkov and Anthony Tomasic, Learning to Understand Web Site Update Requests, IJCAI, 2005.
• 20: Richard Power and Roger Evans. WYSIWYM with wider coverage. ACL-04, 2004.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
VIO, forms, information extraction, machine learning, microforms, natural language analysis, virtual information officer